MAXAKALI INDIGENOUS LAND, Brazil — Instead of cattle, the Indigenous. And nothing else changes in the landscape as soon as one crosses the sign announcing the entrance to the Maxakali Indigenous Land. The rest is grass. Not even the tops of the hills escaped the brown covering that at one time dressed the ancestral territory of the Tikmũ’ũn and clung to it as scabs adhere to flesh. Every morning, the mist that slowly rises over the dead soil now seems to express the tragic visage of shrouds.

When Joviano Maxakali asked me to go with him in search of embaúbas, I didn’t think we’d go so far: Two hours on the road among immense clumps of Guinea grass to reach a point well beyond the northern limits of the Indigenous land, where a piece of Atlantic Forest has survived the advance of pasture. There, where the embaúbas grow robust, and the spirit-people don’t go hungry.

Tuthi, the fiber of the embaúba (Cecropia glaziovii), is the “mother fiber” of the Tikmũ’ũn, an enchanted tree with which the ancestors are said to have woven various magical objects, including the thread that once connected heaven and Earth and allowed people and spirits to transit between the two worlds. The Tikmũ’ũn say that this thread was cut one day and, to descend to Earth, the spirits had to become animals. The animals that now exist would then be the physical form in which deceased relatives present themselves to the living.

So sacred is the embaúba to the Tikmũ’ũn that there’s a song for each stage of the long process of transforming the fiber from its bark into the thread with which women weave bags, slingshots, bows and fishing nets, as well as the masks that the spirit-people wear when they visit the living world. Music, for them, is one way to activate the shamanic power of the tree. The other is saliva: By moistening the thread during the spinning process, Tikmũ’ũn women transfer their spirit to the embaúba, even granting it healing abilities.

For all these reasons, Joviano Maxakali will spare no effort in searching for embaúbas, wherever they may still exist in what was once Tikmũ’ũn territory: a vast area that covered the northeastern hills of Minas Gerais state and the southern Bahia coast, now reduced to 6,578 hectares (16,255 acres) practically devoid of forest, distributed across four separate and distant reserves — one Indigenous land of 5,305 hectares (13,108 acres) and three other micro-reserves ranging from 120-600 hectares (300-1,480 acres).

All of them are filled with the worst possible pasture, Guinea grass (Panicum maximum), an aggressive African grass whose roots make any type of cultivation unfeasible: It kills the soil so that its leaves can grow vigorously, reaching more than 2 meters (6.5 feet) in height. Hard to weed, above all.

‘Like cattle’

Every Indigenous person in Brazil has a story of extermination to tell about themselves, but the saga of the people we call Maxakali, who call themselves Tikmũ’ũn (“we, men and women”), is especially tragic.

Once accustomed to traversing the valleys of Mucuri, Jequitinhonha and the Rio Doce in search of game, fish and fruits, the Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali now find themselves in a dystopian landscape, surrounded by barbed wire — in theory to keep the cattle from neighboring farms out, which in practice does not happen — and devoid of forest, river, water and land to cultivate and roam.

“Tihik [a Tikmũ’ũn person] likes to walk. It’s our culture. But today we have no way to leave here. We are trapped,” says Isael Maxakali, a shaman, visual artist, filmmaker and one of the main leaders of his people. “This is not a land of freedom; it’s all fenced in. We are like cattle. Everything is confined.”

This enclosed territory is practically all that remains of systematic devastation, accelerated over the past hundred years, since the establishment of the Bahia-Minas Railway in 1911 and the consequent agricultural expansion — both aimed at eliminating everything in the way, whether forests or Indigenous people.

It’s said that farmers at the time hired an “Indians tamer,” named Joaquim Fagundes, tasked with winning the trust of the Maxakali and making them more “docile.” The man claimed to have spent a significant amount of money on this endeavor and demanded reimbursement from the government. As he was not compensated, he sold the Tikmũ’ũn lands to outsiders and then disappeared, leaving the buyers and the Indigenous people to sort it out among themselves.

What followed was all kinds of violence, from intentional fires to the donation of clothes contaminated with smallpox, along with numerous murders. According to the 1942 census, only 59 Tikmũ’ũn remained in the region, concentrated along the Umburanas and Água Boa streams in the Mucuri Valley — a tiny fraction of their original territory.

It was during this time that the SPI (Indian Protection Service, the official Brazilian Indigenous agency at that time) demarcated a small Tikmũ’ũn reserve, the embryo of the current Maxakali Indigenous Land. However, they did that by participating in the dispossession too: Surrounding lands belonging to the Maxakali were leased by the SPI to settlers, including its employees, to establish agricultural colonies. The strategy at the time was to force coexistence with non-Indigenous people to “integrate” the Tikmũ’ũn into the dominant society.

This thought took on a cruel dimension during the Brazilian military regime in the 1970s, with the arrival in the region of Manoel Pinheiro, a captain in the Minas Gerais Military Police, who conceived the Krenak Reformatory — a prison for “rebellious” Indigenous people, where they were subjected to physical punishment — and created the Indigenous Rural Guard, a militia that recruited Indigenous people as soldiers. In Maxakali lands, with the support of the SPI, Captain Pinheiro forced the Indigenous people to work in an extensive agricultural system under strict surveillance, prohibiting traditional hunting and farming. Additionally, he appropriated part of the territory and sent hundreds of jacarandá trees to sawmills.

‘They start dying at 20 years old’

When the Maxakali Indigenous Land was finally declared in 1993, with 5,305 hectares, 30% of the Atlantic Forest remained in the reserve. Since then, even within the Indigenous Land, 700 more hectares (1,730 acres) of forest have been cut down to make way for pasture, leaving the territory with 17% of its original vegetation — and without a single embaúba tree. Considering that the Tikmũ’ũn don’t raise cattle, it’s not hard to guess who’s responsible.

However, the lack of forests is just one of the problems. The rivers within the Indigenous land have long been polluted by waste from neighboring farms, including feces, trash and chemical products. The Maxakali are left to drink water from artesian wells, which also contain fecal coliforms and heavy metals: One study detected iron levels 295 times higher than what is allowed by the Brazilian Ministry of Health (nearly 30,000%) in the Umburanas and Água Boa streams, while aluminum levels approach 25,000%. Additionally, arsenic levels — used in pesticides — are 18 times higher than they should be.

It’s no surprise that infant mortality within the Maxakali Indigenous Land is 10 times higher than in surrounding municipalities, which already have the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) in Minas Gerais state. One in four Maxakali children dies before reaching 1 year of age. And those who survive rarely reach adulthood. “They start dying at 20 years old,” says Rosângela de Tugny, an ethnomusicologist who has been conducting research with the Tikmũ’ũn people for two decades, while pointing out how the age pyramid of the local population narrows with age — only 5% of the roughly 2,500 Maxakali people who exists nowadays live past 50 years old.

“It’s a story of many violations,” says Douglas Krenak, regional coordinator of Funai (Indigenous Peoples National Foundation, which substituted SPI) in Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. “We need the Brazilian state, which was complicit in the devastation during the dictatorship, to repair this legacy that was left behind.”

For now, according to Douglas, Funai has been helping to monitor areas invaded by cattle, almost always due to fires started by farmers to renew pastures, which end up destroying the fences that protect the territory. “These fences need to be constantly repaired, and this is not an easy task because of a lack of resources, and the bureaucracy for this kind of work is enormous.”

Aggravating the situation is the warming caused by climate change, which has increased the intensity of fires in northeastern Minas Gerais — currently the hottest region in Brazil. In 2023, of the 20 municipalities that experienced the most warming in the country, 19 were in the Jequitinhonha Valley. Araçuaí, 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the Maxakali Indigenous Land, recorded the highest temperature in Brazil’s history: 44.8° Celsius (112.6° Fahrenheit) in November 2023. The lack of green areas to cool this heat makes the situation even more dramatic for the Tikmũ’ũn people.

A pig for the spirits

“In the past, there was dense forest. Yãmĩyxop used to hunt animals in the forest and bring us peccaries, deer, tapirs,” recalls Manoel Damásio, the pajé (shaman) of Nova Vila village, one of the largest in the Maxakali Indigenous Land. “Now we need animals to eat.”

Yãmĩyxop is the name of the spirit-people who inhabit the Tikmũ’ũn world and manifest in the form of animals, plants and, in ritual contexts, mediated by the men of the villages. The hunts take place exactly under these circumstances, with the presence of the yãmĩyxop. They are the ones who hunt. Because the spirits, too, need to eat.

As Marquinhos Maxakali, the most talented visual artist in Nova Vila, explains while showing one of his paintings that depicts, on one side, a dense forest inhabited by the yãmĩyxop and, on the other, a pasture where the spirit-hawk (Mõgmõka) and the spirit-manioc-fiber (Kotkuphi) wander, hungry: “The forest is gone, there’s only grass now. Yãmĩyxop are starving.”

That’s why pajé Manoel showed no hesitation when he asked me to buy him a pig — alive, because the yãmĩyxop needed to hunt it before eating. Without tapirs and peccaries, the Maxakali must re-create the ritual hunt with domestic animals. It’s either that or buying fruits, cookies and frozen chickens at the supermarket with money given by a federal assistance program, one of the few resources the Tikmũ’ũn have to feed themselves and the spirits.

So it was that, on a Saturday dusk, the 200-kilogram (440-pound) spotted pig I had arranged was tied to the ceremonial pole in the village of Nova Vila, meeting its end at the hands of the spirit-hawk’s arrows. Subsequently, the pig would be roasted over the sacred fire to feed both humans and non-humans for many days.

The spirit-people, Rosangela explains, have their own food preferences: “The bat-people (Xũnĩm) prefer bananas; the monkey-people (Po’op) like watermelon; the parrot-people (Putuxop) favor corn.” And who feeds them, she says, are always the women: “The spirits are like adopted children of the village women. They care for them as if they were family.”

The Tikmũ’ũn women are also the only ones who do not speak Portuguese, which, according to Rosângela, is a “survival strategy.” They are the keepers of the Maxakali language, the only surviving language from a group of languages that disappeared with colonization (Patxohã, spoken by the Pataxó and from the same family, is being revived). Today, the Maxakali are among the few peoples in the Atlantic Forest who speak their original language, thanks to the women. “They are the strength of the village,” summarizes Rosângela.

200 hours of songs

One of the great enigmas of the Tikmũ’ũn people is their ability to maintain their culture, spirituality and symbolic repertoire in the context of absolute devastation of their physical territory. It’s as if there is another territory, a spiritual one, that remains intact even after two centuries of contact with white people. Even without land, even in hunger.

Isael Maxakali recounts a time when, on the brink of total extinction, the Tikmũ’ũn shamans gathered and concluded: “If we hold onto the land, our culture will end.” According to Isael, that’s when “the Tikmũ’ũn people let go of the land for ãyuhuk [non-Indigenous people] and took their culture, language and songs” and hid in the region’s caves. “The shamans were very smart. That’s why our language is alive.”

Alive and vaccinated against everything that comes from the white world. The Tikmũ’ũn indeed use a variety of objects to compose the masks and clothing of the yãmĩyxop: underwear, t-shirts, garbage bags, threads from frayed blouses, industrial paints for face painting — anything goes. Even the otter-people use cell phones to communicate with each other.

But this is all a result of the tremendous material scarcity in this territory. Although the Maxakali love to listen to popular Brazilian music, the songs through which the yãmĩyxop express themselves remain incorruptible, immune to Portuguese, a barrier even more impenetrable than the fences meant to protect them from neighboring cattle.

And we’re talking about one of the richest and most complex repertoires of Indigenous music in Brazil: At least 200 hours of songs distributed among 12 groups of spirit-peoples, each one a distinct aesthetic universe. “There are twelve repertoires associated with very different mythologies and imaginations,” says Rosângela, currently the leading researcher in the country on this musical-spiritual heritage.

Thus, the song set of the hawk-people encompasses not only the spirit of this raptor but also all those that are its prey: the owl, the frog, the piping guan. Meanwhile, the tapir-people include medium and large ruminants, such as deer, capybaras and even cows. The most intriguing thing about it is that each group of spirit-people has its own words, related to the Maxakali language but not belonging to it; as Rosângela explains, “It’s like the embryo of 12 Latins.”

For her, this is a clue that each set of sacred songs may be remnants of languages that are now extinct, spoken by peoples related to the Maxakali who lived in the region. One piece of evidence is that the Tikmũ’ũn can identify the geographic origin of each spirit-people: the parrot people (Putuxop), for example, would have come from the southern coast of Bahia — the land, in fact, of the Pataxó (note the similarity in names). “There’s this theory that this repertoire came from the merging of several peoples who, to survive, gathered in this more mountainous area,” says Rosângela.

Reforesting with words

More than remnants of vanished peoples, the Tikmũ’ũn songs are a memory of an Atlantic Forest that has long since disappeared too. The Maxakali spiritual repertoire describes hundreds of species of plants and animals that are now extinct in the region, many of which even the elders of the villages have never known.

For example, the song set of the hawk-people mentions more than a hundred species of animals, including about 30 bird species that have not sung in Tikmũ’ũn territory for a long time. “There are precise descriptions of these birds in the songs, even though they have never seen them,” Rosângela says.

One of the songs of the spirit-hawk enumerates 18 species of snakes, while the song of the spirit-tayra lists 33 species of native bees. Rosângela shares that “they say that there are only two of those bees here. I had to go with them to the Entomology lab at UFMG [Federal University of Minas Gerais] for them to identify those bees.” Some, she notes, don’t even have names in Portuguese.

“Those songs are memories of the Atlantic Forest,” Rosângela summarizes. In other words, they serve as an inventory of the forest’s biodiversity that survives in the voice of the Tikmũ’ũn, even in dead land and sick bodies. But, as the researcher explains, while the Maxakali sing, the boundaries of the human become stronger as the spirit-peoples lend their healthy bodies, voices and visions to humans. It’s as if nature comes back to life, reforested by words, in all its strength.

“For them, each body has a power, a capacity to do things that we here can’t. When they sing, it is as if they were experiencing the power of a hawk-body, a bat-body; everything they see and hear,” explains Rosângela, giving as an example a song in which the wood rail and the duck undertake a shamanic journey to the Pleiades. “Our yãmĩyxop is very strong,” assures pajé Manoel.

That’s why the yãmĩyxop show up in the villages whenever extra help is needed — which can happen anytime. Like when the Tikmũ’ũn reclaimed a land a few years ago: when the farmers came after them, it was the yãmĩyxop who came to fight, dressed in masks and carrying stones. “With a single stone, they broke the car window,” says Rosângela.

Spirits are also essential in illnesses, as the songs of the yãmĩyxop bring both diagnosis and cure. When someone is sick, the shaman asks “what song did you dream about?” The answer reveals which spirit-people are causing the illness; all you need to do is sing their songs for the cure to occur.

As Rosângela explains, “I once asked one of them: ‘Why don’t you forget these songs?’ and they replied: ‘If we forget, we lose the possibility of curing our illnesses.’”

‘To make it beautiful’ 

But, as we have seen, the yãmĩyxop also need to eat to stay strong. That’s why, to feed both people and spirits, a group of researchers, along with the Opaoká Institute, conceived the Hãmhi Terra Viva project: an initiative aimed at repopulating Tikmũ’ũn territory with areas of Atlantic Forest and agroforestry backyards — through the hands of the Maxakali themselves.

With funding from environmental compensation fines from Brazil’s biggest mining company, mediated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Minas Gerais, the Hãmhi project has been training what it calls “agroforestry agents”: 30 Maxakali men who receive seeds, seedlings, agricultural equipment kits and training in agroecology, along with a monthly stipend of 650 reais ($120) for reforestation work in the forests and the creation of agroforestry croplands in the villages. As pajé Manoel Damásio summarizes, “for the forest to return, animals to return and religion to return too. To make it beautiful.”

In just one year since the project started, in June 2023, the Tikmũ’ũn agroforestry agents have already recovered 55 hectares (135 acres) of Atlantic Forest and planted another 35 hectares (86 acres) of agroecological farms. In both areas, including the forest, food is the foundation, as Rosângela explains: “The reforestation areas also have cultivation. We are dealing with a population that is hungry. We cannot overlook the need to plant food.”

That’s why both the reforested areas and the croplands are built around fruit-bearing trees — which, depending on the goal, can include banana trees, guava trees and jackfruit trees, or native species like araçá, araticum and jerivá. Wherever they are, fruit trees provide shade, mild temperatures, nutrients for the soil, erosion control and, of course, food for people, animals and spirits. In this first year of Hãmhi, the agents have already planted around 47,000 seedlings of these trees.

At ground level, cassava, pumpkins, corn, beans, sweet potatoes and more than 50 other crops contribute to the goal of alleviating malnutrition among the Tikmũ’ũn, ensuring food sovereignty and, as Rosângela puts it, “offering a possibility for this youth that is dying.”

Dying, indeed, from alcoholism, one of the most serious social problems in the Maxakali territory — fueled, in fact, by local establishment owners who use alcohol sales to extort the Indigenous. Fortunately, this is no longer the case for Roberto Maxakali: “I used to drink cachaça [a liquor from sugarcane], but since I started working as an agroforestry agent, I don’t drink much anymore. Because there’s work to do, right?”

The women, for their part, take care of the project’s plant nurseries: There are three of them, totaling 35,000 seedlings of Atlantic Forest species and another 37,000 of fruit-bearing trees, cared for by 15 Hãmhi nurserywomen, who refer to the plant nurseries as the “womb of the forest.” The seedlings were donated by the State Institute of Forests and the Arboretum Program, and it is the women’s responsibility to ensure that each plant grows enough to find its place in the forest. This work sometimes includes weeding the plastic bags containing the seedlings; as Rosangela notes, “Grass grows even inside the bags.”

The biggest challenge of the Hãmhi project is precisely overcoming the Guinea grass, a dishonest race where the grass gets a head start due to the vigor of its seeds. Forest engineer Viviane Barazetti, technical coordinator of the Arboretum Program, explains that “it’s not just about planting seedlings. The Guinea grass grows faster than the fruit trees; we must return to the backyards every three months.” “Look at that area that no one has managed,” Rosângela adds, pointing to a grass patch that already exceeds the height of the banana trees.

There’s no better metaphor for the survival crisis of the Tikmũ’ũn than the name of this grass in Portuguese, “colonizer grass.” But, when it comes to the Maxakali, it’s worth remembering that their most sacred tree is precisely the embaúba, a so-called pioneer species capable of germinating in the most hostile soil and, with its nutrients, preparing the ground for other plants to grow there, eventually giving rise to a new forest.

Armed with the strength of the embaúba, the Tikmũ’ũn also receive extra help from the yãmĩyxop, who actively participate in all stages of the project: “On the day we started the first planting, the spirits came first and sang for all the seedlings in the plant nursery; then they stayed to watch the entire planting process, as if they were supervising,” Rosângela recounts. And the harvest, she adds, cannot be done without the yãmĩyxop’s authorization.

This effort has been rewarding, as Rogério Maxakali, a resident of Água Boa village, explains: “We only used to eat things from ãyuhuk [non-Indigenous], which don’t suit us. Yãmĩyxop too. Today we eat plenty of cassava, sweet potatoes and pumpkins. We no longer need to buy in the city.” Rosângela comments that the agroforestry agents of Hãmhi have even become a multiplying example, meaning other Maxakali have begun to create their own agroecological farms independently in the villages. Soon, they will be able to sell their harvests in nearby towns.

Douglas Krenak from Funai sees further capability: “Hãmhi has the potential to show the state that it’s possible to reconstruct a territory that the state itself has destroyed. This can be a pilot project to mitigate Brazil’s land conflicts and socio-environmental problems.”

Singing to reforest 

While in Maxakali Indigenous Land the agroforestry agents are battling against Guinea grass (and everything it represents), 200 kilometers (120 miles) away, in the rural area of Teófilo Otoni, Isael Maxakali breathes a sigh of relief.

Isael is the pajé of what he calls the Aldeia-Escola-Floresta (School-Forest Village), a 120-hectare (300-acre) reserve to which 100 Tikmũ’ũn families moved in 2021 after a long pilgrimage in search of land. Since leaving the Maxakali Indigenous Territory in 2004 due to internal conflicts, they spent 17 years living in various territories — five, to be exact — full of grass, without access to water, suffering from fraudsters, evangelical missionaries, and a hydroelectric plant at risk of collapsing on their homes. When they finally discovered the unoccupied lands of Itamunheque farm, nearly 400 Tikmũ’ũn, led by Isael and his wife Sueli, occupied it in just one night.

The territory is small and surrounded by hills, which amplifies the feeling of confinement that Isael described earlier. But at last, it’s Tikmũ’ũn land: On April 26, 2024, the federal government signed the Free Use Grant Contract, recognizing the Maxakali’s right to the Aldeia-Escola-Floresta.

The name, Isael says, is “because everywhere here is a classroom.” Starting with the forest, which has grown back on its own over the hills in three years, embracing the agroforestry backyards of the Hãmhi project that spread through the valley. What the Atlantic Forest teaches here is its astonishing power of regeneration — and its pact with the spirits.

“There was nothing here. Just grass and ticks,” Isael recalls. “Then we arrived, and it started to rain. The neighbor from the settlement next door asked: ‘Hey, Isael, what did you do? When you weren’t here, it didn’t rain; now it’s raining all the time.’” What they did was sing to the spirit-bat, “because he’s the one who calls the rain.” Then the trees, as they grew, took it upon themselves to draw the strength from the Guinea grass with their roots.

“The land is like a dog when it gets mange: you have to give it medicine for it to be cured,” says Sueli Maxakali, Isael’s wife and one of the most important female leaders of the Tikmũ’ũn people. “The land is the same: When we see the grass, the fur of the land, it’s the shell that’s sick.” And, as we know, in Maxakali lands, there’s no better cure than the music of the yãmĩyxop.

It seems to be working. “It’s been two years now that it has been reforesting itself,” Sueli says. “And there are so many, many birds singing. They are happy because they see the forest coming back. Do you hear?” She points her hand to the sky. A chirp cuts through the valley; I ask for the name, and she replies, “We call it xãmtut, I don’t know how to translate.” I found out later: It’s a great antshrike (Taraba major). “It’s a little bird that’s like a mother to us.”

Read also: In the Brazilian outback, the half-century Kapinawá struggle for sacred ground

Banner image of Joviano Maxakali, one of the leaders of the Maxakali Indigenous Land. Image by Xavier Bartaburu/Mongabay.

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Xavier Bartaburu Editor

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